“Should I start with the early stage companies?” she wrote. “Like the time I was at a startup and the founder I was working for — a guy who owned a hundred shirts in the same color and quoted Steve Jobs on a daily basis — asked me whether we should hand out dildos as company swag or consider converting our social media platform into an anonymous sex club. (We even whiteboarded it.)”

She wrote that a partner at one company “‘jokingly’ offered up my female friend, his employee, as an enticement for a founder to work with his firm.”

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In addition to a lack of ethnic and gender diversity, which created a workforce that “doesn’t remotely resemble the outside world,” Powell described staffers as spoiled — despite their obvious desire to make the world a better place.

“The employees at my most recent job — running PR at a huge tech company — were some of the smartest, most passionate people I’ve ever worked with,” she wrote. “They worked through the night to help people in a natural disaster. They gave money and vacation time to help the sick family members of other employees. They ran marathons on the weekend to raise money for clean water in Africa.”

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At the same time, Powell said her colleagues would devote their time to “complaining on company message boards about the brand of water stocked in the micro-kitchens.”

Beyond the “progressive politics” and “mighty ethical stands against evil,” she said Silicon Valley is not the enlightened nirvana some might think it is.

“But there is also what drove me to leave the big tech company last fall and take a break,” she wrote. “The issues that I got tired of defending at parties. The endless use of ‘scale’ as an excuse for being unable to solve problems in a human way. The faux earnestness, the self-righteousness. All those cheery product ads set to ukulele music.”

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Powell said she felt moved to write a book based on her experiences in the hopes of raising some red flags that could help create a better tech industry for employees and consumers alike.

“First, I wanted to explore what drives the insatiable expansion of the big tech companies,” she wrote. “Despite how the industry is sometimes portrayed in the media, I don’t really think the management teams at Facebook, Google, Apple, Uber, or Amazon wake up each morning thinking about how to steal more user data or drive us all out of our jobs. Those are real consequences, but not the root cause. Rather, it’s the desperation to stay on top and avoid being relegated to a dusty corner of the Computer History Museum that pushes these companies into further and further reaches of our lives.”

Chris Agee is an American journalist with more than 15 years of experience in a variety of newsroom settings. After covering crime and other beats for newspapers and radio stations across the U.S., he served as managing editor at Western Journalism until 2017. He has also been a regular guest and guest host on several syndicated radio programs. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona, with his wife and son.